It also has to do with the crown corporation BC Hydro being forbidden to build any more of its own new power stations. Instead small scale hydro is put in place by private companies, and BC Hydro signs lengthy contracts at inflated rates to purchase the power. I think there are something like $40 billion of those contracts lined up already.
My only regret is that I have but a single thumbs up to bestow!
The line seems to be that if there was an epidemic of common sense and all legislation regarding intellectual "property" was repealed world wide tomorrow, that all creativity would cease altogether immediately and we would spiral down into a dark and boring world devoid of any progress or entertainment value.
What a huge load of horseshit. How did we get to where we are today then? Only by the good graces of the "Intellectual Property Industry" in places like ancient China, Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, Rome?
I've always said, and I'll say it again: even if you penalized people for singing songs and telling stories and drawing pictures and inventing things, guess what it would be just like the unwinnable war on drugs, people would still do all of those things.
Anybody claiming that we would all be harmed by the total annihilation of American Idol, Backstreet Boys, Big Brother, Harry Potter, Survivor, 100s of millions of dollars to tell a story that was originally told with a 50c comic book or even more astounding Battleship, etc etc ad nauseum, well I'll bet you've got some "prime" real estate or a used car to sell as well.
I'll bet you a trillion dollars that I'll still be able to go down to the pub and see a live band, or go see a play at the theatre, or go down to the gallery and see some art, or find someone to tell me a story I haven't heard before. Or even more specifically be able to hire someone to create a logo for a business, or take photographs at a wedding, or sculpt a big ass statue of yours truly.
So toss a fucking match on it all already. This is a new age, if you have something to say you can send it around the world and back at the stroke of a key press, so get all the arthritic pablum rationing dinosaurs out of the god damn way. Whatever we end up with can't possibly be half as retarded as what we have right now.
"When I feel threatened by students, no matter how unarmed, peaceful and seated they may be, I know that Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray has got my back as I casually spray away at point blank range.
It really is the Cadillac of citizen repression technology."
"short term benfit in charging for storing other people's waste"
I was under the impression that the waste would need to be stored for quite a while? And will likely continue to be generated for the forseeable future as well? What kind of time frame are you thinking about?
So when you found the product you were looking for, was it in the sort of store that would be well served spending $$$$ to build a searchable/indexable website version of their catalog/inventory, to have someone create (and keep current!) a Facebook page, and to research Google Search & Maps and Bing and make sure that Sally's Stationary Store comes up right alongside Staples and Office Depot? That would get Sally what, the pleasure of knowing you didn't have to go too far out of your way to bring them your $10? There's money to be made giving Sally that hip feeling sure, but you could just sell her some wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men to put on the roof and get Sally a similar result, quite possibly even more people would notice.
"valuable tools for the police, or for searching collapsed buildings in rescue operations."
Seems like the mantra of a developing Skynet. Don't worry meatbags, these new additions to the hive are only being created for your benefit.
Given how many earthquakes there are, and then how many buildings collapse in those earthquakes, and how many of those buildings have people in them, and how many of those people become trapped, and then how many of those trapped people could possibly be saved, you could count the lives saved annually by these new tiny flying kill-bots in the handfuls, maybe. Meanwhile on the battlefield...
Also reminds me of the old copyright saw: just because there are possible non infringing legitimate uses for your technology, that doesn't mean that it is good / allowed to exist.
"Please name one." Maybe I could if the leader of the free world hadn't been so bloodthirstily burning down villages around the world in order to save them.
"Yes, it's called a "one-party" system, the complete opposite of democracy." It's different than pluralistic democracy, but it is not the opposite of democracy. In the opposite of democracy the king appoints governors and doesn't even bother pretending to let common people vote.
"WIth Communism you have no choice, indeed not agreeing with "the state" is usually going to mean prison time (if you're lucky)." The USA has more people in prison than any other country. Explain how the House Un-American Activities Committee fits into your worldview of communism = dictatorship and capitalism = freedom to vote for who you choose.
"If you didn't notice, the Berlin Wall fell because the people in the Communist countries got tired of not having choices." It might have also had something to do with the USSR bankrupting itself trying to maintain some semblance of competitiveness with the totally insane level of mililtary spending in the USA. Do you think history will be as kind in describing the fall of the USA-Mexico wall, where the misery and death is an order of magnitude higher?
I won't mention my opinion of your strong points, or lack of them.
Communism compares to capitalism. Democracy compares to dictatorship. Communism does not compare to democracy. You can have communist democracies and you can have capitalist disctatorships.
Communism does not mean a group of leaders deciding what everyone does. Even in Stalin's harsh version, the party was just a temporary situation meant to lead one day to true full blown communism, or at least he paid lip service to the theory.
Communist countries do elect representatives in a democratic fashion, it's just that they must all be from the communist party. Meanwhile in the USA, instead of 1 you get 2 parties to choose from, how much better is that? ;-) You have the Republican and the Democratic wings of the corporatist party eating each other's tails, could you imagine nationalizing and then privatising everything every 4 years??
WHY people are searching for what they are searching
I'm searching for something so that I can find it. If you put a bunch of moving flashing lights in my way, I will think about searching some other way. Even if you put an ad up for exactly the perfectly right thing every time someone looks at your page, you will get a sale from maybe 5 in a million of your visitors instead of 1 in a million. Either way you end up with 999,995+ visitors who suffer varying episodes of annoyance for your efforts and nothing much else. People think if they just tweak the formulas a little bit all of a sudden being advertised at will be a desireable experience or something...
The question we products have to answer is just how much we will put up with being considered a product.
I look at an item in the store, and it occurs to me how things like people pondering strategies for advertising campaigns, bankers working on tweaking a few more points out of all the money they create out of thin air, various seats of government with the cesspool of coutiers that always follow, managers striving for total situational awareness and control, sundry executive level parasites, and I wonder what the $19.99 I'm looking at would be without any of all that - maybe $4? And I wonder what the goal of the game played between free market and planned economies was? Which one was nimble and which one was bogged down with bureaucracy and layers of people adding no value and grunts at the bottom with motivation deficiencies? What exactly did capitalism win? The prize for being the most inneficient soul crushing minutely monitored war hungry dog eat dog inform on your neighbour way of life going? Grumble grumble get off my yard etc...
first they set up an underclass by rounding up africans and bringing them over as slaves. the people who werent african didnt mind, in fact they enjoyed all the inexpensive merchandise that resulted.
then they wiped out the indigineous population. the people who werent native didnt mind, in fact they enjoyed all the lebensraum.
then, since slavery had since been outlawed, to keep the underclass vigorous they brought in chinese and treated them like pack animals. people who werent chines didnt mind, in fact they rather enjoyed getting their railroads built and laundry done for peanuts.
then they made drugs illegal and rounded up (and are still rounding up) anyone who chooses anything besides the bibles own family&society enhealthening alcohol. alcoholics and people who get high on life werent bothered.
then they rounded up the japanese and sent them to camps. people who werent japanese didnt mind, in fact they enjoyed the fire sale prices on their property.
then they rounded up the communists and destroyed their lives. people who werent communist didnt mind, in fact denouncing the competition was an easy way to get ahead in the rat race.
then they beat and even opened fire on people against the war in vietnam. people who werent against the war couldnt care less.
then they came for the muslims, the copyright infringers, the people who like raw milk, the people who like alternative medicine, the people against the wars in the middle east, the earth firsters, the animal rights activists, the occupy protesters, etc etc etc, giving themselves more and more overreaching powers at each step. the people who werent any of those just kept watching the superbowl and survivor and generally being good little consumers figuring it could never happen to them.
and then one day, when joe the plumbers favourite web forum (model railroading, stamp collecting, whatever) was all of a sudden not available because of something to do with copyright violation, he went ahead and looked into it and found out there was a way around it, and regained himself access. which according to sopa is illegal immoral job killing and downright devilish, and so they finally got around to coming for him too.
and the people who werent him, like the original poster above, cheered and said job well done.
"The Steam client in particular broke the 5m concurrent user mark this week, a sign that an increasing number of people are turning to such platforms to amass content."
Nobody "turns" to Steam, they are shoved into it. 4.9 million of those users had never heard of Steam until it was forced on them by a game they had "purchased". 4.8 million of them would uninstall Steam and never go near it again if they had any other choice besides not playing "their" games.
*I will keep my the statistical methodology I used to calculate those numers to myself, thanks in advance for not asking.
**Some people seem to just love Steam. I assume they are shills by the way they crowd into any forum that mentions Steam, but will admit the possibility some of them may be authentic. So maybe not quite everyone who has Steam imposed on them would rather get out.
even if it was smooth sailing, its still extra hassle dumped on me for nobodys benefit except the publisher and steam. i dont know why you feel happy about doing them any favours beyond handing over your money? whos the simple one here? im not worried about complexity, thanks.
baically the box physically came from a store, it got to my house and i took the disc out, and i expected to install it and play it. i did not expect to be expected to become close friends with a 3rd party such as steam. *IF* i wanted to go online and play multiplayer, i would have nothing to complain about if steam was an option for that, like gamespy or something, in addition to what should be the basic requirement of being able to fire up my own host without asking anyone elses permission, and if steam are all that great i might even come to prefer them over other options. but i feel like i got invited out to dinner by a friend only to realize they are setting me up on a blind date with some marketer or banker or something, and before we can sit down to eat i have to agree in writing to futher dates. even if painfully attractive, my friend crosed a line and i dont much like those kinds of people anyway. my corn flakes are pissed in, we are off on the wrong foot, i am demotivated, not likey to turn out well for anyone involved. there are better ways to go about things.
i got civ iv complete edition a while ago. right on the box it says:
"DRM Free: The complete Civ IV experience with no Digital Rights Management limitations"
hale fucking lujah!!!1!1!
huge respect boost for the franchise i have loved ever since civ ii :-)
i got civ v for xmas, very exciting, looking forward to it so much. it says on the box:
"*Internet connection and acceptance of Steam Subscriber Agreement required for activation."
jesus tap dancing christ what the hell. 900 deg turn around. i would not have bought it, and rightly so because it turned out a real pain in the behind. i already had the steam client on, i had checked out some free game offer in a silly moment way back, so i already new it wasnt something i was interested in. and after updating, figuring out my password, more downloads, problems etc problems etc, my bias is confirmed - do not want. but it was a gift, so what should i do?
i wont buy a game that uses steam. ive lost interest in any potential civ vi because of their incomprehensible switch to steam. what a terrible stupid useless inconvenience foisted on paying customers, zero respect for any company who thinks its a good idea. boo hiss etc.
"The Supreme Court was established by Part 3 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and started work on 1 October 2009."
Well I'll be a... flabbergasted something or other. If we have a Supreme Court here in Canada, and we always have as far as I was ever concerned, then I just assumed that you there in the Mother Country would have had one for centuries longer. There, I learned something for the day, good night then!
"The creation of the Court was provided for by the British North America Act, 1867, renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act, 1867. The first bills for the creation of a federal supreme court, introduced in the Parliament of Canada in 1869 and in 1870, were withdrawn. It was not until 8 April 1875, that a bill was finally passed providing for the creation of a Supreme Court of Canada."
"Prior to 1949, however, the Supreme Court did not constitute the court of last resort; litigants could appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London."
The people of the world got together and we all shared all of our culture. It was beautiful, anyone could get access to practically everything ever created, it could hardly have been improved on. Then the Recording Industry Ass. of America marshalled their forces and declared war on culture. Grandmothers were bankrupted for "stealing" music. RIAA rented politicians who made it more and more of a crime to posess an "unauthorized" recording of a performance. People of the future will look back on this time and shake their heads. The good fight carries on, splintered and underground, but totalitarianism can't win in the end. The internet is based on sharing, the World Wide Web is all about sharing, people instinctually share, often even when it costs (as it certainly *doesn't* when talking about digitized data). Some people think sharing is communist and that communism for some reason is evil. Mostly those people are the people who have more. Those people are losing, those people will lose.
If you went back 25,000 years, and told the cavemen sitting around the campfire to stop singing that song because its your song and you worked hard to create it so they have to give you 3 furs each time they perform it, you would have been banished from the tribe, and they would have laughed and kept singing "your" song. As it was and will and should be.
Your art has no value unless you share it. And once you share it, it's not yours anymore.
if you take the $0.007 (or whatever) of fuel used to get my can of peas onto the store shelf, and increase that to $0.0071 (or whatever) with harsh regressive carbon taxes, I'm not going to starve. But thanks for thinking about me.
Then let's go to darkest Africa and you show me the store with the shelves with the truck pulling up to the back to unload. I assume you picture the rest of the planet to be like your neighbourhood, but so much poorer. For the average earthling (<$2/day), the lucky ones (ie not among the tens of thousands who starved to death today) get their groceries by walking down to the village market to see what the local beasts of burden have dragged in from the fields today. Put a 10,000% carbon tax on and the millenia will continue to pass by as normal.
Holy shit I would hunt down and kill every one of you to get to see a full feature length amount of this awesomeness. As for another version of WoW, even with a Star Wars skin on it - meh. I guess I would probably try it out if it was free. Galaxies was kind of neat, but not enough to pay a monthly subscription for, glad I didn't since they murdered the thing anyway.
Cookie cutter quests on rails are BORING. It should be totally player driven. I want the fat slob in his mothers basement who's been playing 20 hrs a day for 6 months and built up a Hutt empire the likes of which has never been seen before to have a guy in a cantina where a noob like me can sign up and get marching orders to join a campaign to burn down Mos Eisley on his whim. Or something like that. I want to be able to join the Stormtroopers and work up to being a company leader and then just decide to mutiny and take my men out to be mercenaries for hire, and I want that to piss off whatever guy is battalion commander and for him to hire an assassin to take me down. Or whatever the hell anyone wants. Anything else might as well be single player.
You can't get any better at targetting ads at me than just doing it randomly. Seriously. Do not want. Have never ever bought something because I saw it in an ad. The ad could be for a brand new life extending pill that also make you handsomer and that's just gone on sale for 95% off, and I would pass right by it or get up to use the bathroom while it played. I don't want to know about any "product" unless I am out looking for it, just make it convenient for me to find the information WHEN I WANT IT and that's the best you can do. If you try to cram information down my throat just because you think I might be interested you are pissing in the wind at best, more likely planting the seed of annoyance with your "brand" in my head.
"All this free technology" - so everything isn't hugely more expensive because of all the utterly ridiculously pointlessly retarded amount of resources that go into marketing in all its parasitic forms? The unholy triumvirate of financial and legal and promotional, doing their best to make capitalism into way more of an unworkable joke collapsing under its own weight than communism ever was.
We're no closer to AI than when he first invented the term, only able to make that much more detailed simulations thanks to moore's law marching on. Could have made a computer to win every possible chess match in the 70s if there were terabytes of memory and petabytes of storage and gigahertz of processing power available. Could make an expert system truly expert if you jam in enough rules and have enough processing power to trawl through them all. But that's not how intelligence works. Or maybe it is, who can say, we still have barely the faintest clue.
When the internet gains (gained?) consciousness, the trick will be (is?) to even recognize it as such. If it influences the world, say by creating online personalities, or altering communications between actual personalities online, who could guess what the goal might be? How long do you suppose it could (will?) go on without breaking through the surface of human awareness? When Gaia reaches this level in planetary evolution, who or what out there might take notice? At some point maybe the need for us fungal microbes that made it all possible might fade away, maybe there will be some kind of a molting?
I took the artificial intelligence option at school because it sounded interesting, and it was, but fat lot of good it did me :( Lisp and Prolog, like LSD and DMT, give your brain a good stretching, that can be healthy in some way I suppose, but not much more point to it than that.
Cheers to the man for doing his bit to keep novelty progressing.
By your own admission your "right" to profit is worth more than people's lives. If something saves lives, then getting that something cheaper could save more lives, who are you to tell people they deserve to die because otherwise you would be !cheated!, dying people just line up and you will save them as fast as you can and thank goodness you can set your lawyers on anyone who tries to help or else then what kind of world would we live in. Try a different analogy please.
Yes, if they had a big hit when they were 10 years old (the vast majority of us won't live past 80), and then never worked another day in their lives. Sorry, I don't have any tears for someone like that.
Not, if they had hits early in their careers and then <gasp>kept working at it</gasp> and created more good music later in their lives. You know, like all the rest of us plebes.
Between copyright/patents and sex/drugs prohibition, no wonder there is so little respect for the law, and the fence post politicians who write the laws, and the scavenger lawyers who argue the laws, with law enforcement personnel stuck trying to maintain some semblance of order under it all.
kijiji.ca is still alive and thriving, this is the first I've heard it had anything to do with ebay. No mention on the about page:
http://kijijiblog.ca/about-us/
Now that I look through the other countries (never even occured to me before), I see kijiji still used in a lot of countries, a bunch of countries are gumtree (mostly European), another bunch are slando (mostly Eastern European), and another bunch are ebay related, with a few other random collections of letters as well. What a mess!
"using social media where its own service has failed"
But what if Twitter was down at the same time? I guess then you could say it would truly be time to panic? Because as long as you can tweet to your customers "we are aware that your service is currently unavailable" then you can say you've done everything you possibly could have with a straight face.
When the paperwork that used to take too much time is automated, then do you end up with more time to do real work? No, because now you can do much more paperwork. When the manager who used to get a report on last week next week now gets a report on yesterday last night, they can dream up 10 times as many reports to be required, and have more meetings to discuss it all. Corporate used to get quarterly reports by division now has day by day results available and wants to drill down to individuals (but not be overloaded!). Where someone used to send out a few memos a day, then dozens of faxes a day, they can now email hundreds of people a day (or "tweet" to thousands). We're all doing more, but are we being more productive? I don't think standard of living is improving anymore anyway, relation? Dragging society down with busy work, because we can?
Shoulda woulda coulda fired a quick question at The Google before posting about my vague recollection of NASA history, but the steam pressure between my ears was red lining!
Revising safety margins in light of new information is all well and good, and in this case safe is actually even safer than we thought, but we are talking about highly radioactive substances that will melt your face of if you look at them funny, when we are assured that it is absolutely safe then it's very uncomfortable to find out that there was actually something left to learn about it, even if in this case the missing information was in our favour.
Sounds very convincing, is that based on some wondrous new discoveries in chemistry I haven't heard of? They didn't know this before?? Did not take water into account??? Is this supposed to be more or less comforting than when they mixed metric and imperial and a space shuttle blew up???? Lessons learned, now it's actually really safe for real this time, honest!!
How about book titles? If I put together a list of <someobscurecategory> books, and put it up on my website *with ads!1!!* for fans of <someobscurecategory>, when the publishing houses notice they can say "hey look someone has come up with an inovative new way to make money, let's milk them to death with court cases and outrageous demands for fees". Book titles are hard to come up with, and if someone comes up with a way to make money from them, then that should be turned into less money so that some corporations can get their rightful cut, and then even less money as some oversized fee collecting bureaurocracy is set up and populated with useless hangers on.
When the whole point of headlines / book titles / sound recordings / video recordings in the first place was to entice people into lining up for the full experience, and they still perform that function nicely, but once the smell of money gets in the water the lawyers get into a frenzy and people start getting weird ideas that where headlines were once written for hire and then given away to anyone who would take one now they are some kind of works of art that nobody should be able to experience without paying a fee to a huge parade of middlemen.
The ridiculousness rolls on. Small wonder so many people tune out?
We sold our first one today, which means we sold none yesterday, so if we follow this daily infinity percent increase trend out to 2015, ZOMFG $73 TRILLION MARKET HOP ON WHILE THE HOPPING IS GOOD!!!1!!eleventy1!!!
I understood it to be more like circumcision. In order to technically be castration, wouldn't it need to involve the ovaries? I don't think they cut that deep?
So ban it all then, including peircings and tatoos and branding.
But seriously, nobody should be allowed to do that shit to children, male or female.
Conventional coal stations are competing entirely on their own two feet??
Everything boils down to cost, so that if something doesn't generate acceptable income then there is no possible other reason for that something to exist?
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180 posts • joined Friday 9th March 2007 18:26 GMT
Page:
Re: Open your wallets
It also has to do with the crown corporation BC Hydro being forbidden to build any more of its own new power stations. Instead small scale hydro is put in place by private companies, and BC Hydro signs lengthy contracts at inflated rates to purchase the power. I think there are something like $40 billion of those contracts lined up already.
http://www.vancouversun.com/technology/Hydro+awash+private+power/6605915/story.html#ixzz1uZzivKep"
http://www.pacificfreepress.com/news/1/6835-bc-hydro-in-extreme-financial-peril-due-to-campbell-private-energy-policy.html
Go capitalism!!
Re: So what's the solution?
My only regret is that I have but a single thumbs up to bestow!
The line seems to be that if there was an epidemic of common sense and all legislation regarding intellectual "property" was repealed world wide tomorrow, that all creativity would cease altogether immediately and we would spiral down into a dark and boring world devoid of any progress or entertainment value.
What a huge load of horseshit. How did we get to where we are today then? Only by the good graces of the "Intellectual Property Industry" in places like ancient China, Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, Rome?
I've always said, and I'll say it again: even if you penalized people for singing songs and telling stories and drawing pictures and inventing things, guess what it would be just like the unwinnable war on drugs, people would still do all of those things.
Anybody claiming that we would all be harmed by the total annihilation of American Idol, Backstreet Boys, Big Brother, Harry Potter, Survivor, 100s of millions of dollars to tell a story that was originally told with a 50c comic book or even more astounding Battleship, etc etc ad nauseum, well I'll bet you've got some "prime" real estate or a used car to sell as well.
I'll bet you a trillion dollars that I'll still be able to go down to the pub and see a live band, or go see a play at the theatre, or go down to the gallery and see some art, or find someone to tell me a story I haven't heard before. Or even more specifically be able to hire someone to create a logo for a business, or take photographs at a wedding, or sculpt a big ass statue of yours truly.
So toss a fucking match on it all already. This is a new age, if you have something to say you can send it around the world and back at the stroke of a key press, so get all the arthritic pablum rationing dinosaurs out of the god damn way. Whatever we end up with can't possibly be half as retarded as what we have right now.
"Green Peace boat burning gallons of diesel"
yeah look at all the smoke belching out of the thing, they recruit people for direct action and they end up shovelling coal into it:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/about/ships/the-rainbow-warrior/
retard.
cant believe nobody posted this one yet
Defense Tech 56895 Pepper Spray Aerosol Projector MK-9 Stream 1.3% 12 OZ
"When I feel threatened by students, no matter how unarmed, peaceful and seated they may be, I know that Defense Technology 56895 MK-9 Stream, 1.3% Red Band/1.3% Blue Band Pepper Spray has got my back as I casually spray away at point blank range.
It really is the Cadillac of citizen repression technology."
Re: UK Dumping Ground
"short term benfit in charging for storing other people's waste"
I was under the impression that the waste would need to be stored for quite a while? And will likely continue to be generated for the forseeable future as well? What kind of time frame are you thinking about?
Re: Learns How Much Enegery You Are Using
My power company says its all rainbows and unicorns:
http://www.bchydro.com/news/conservation/unplug_this_blog/2011/home_area_networks.html
hit me
<i>if I haven't been <s>struck</s> already...</i> aw hell <b>hit me agin</b>
<a href="http://www.imagepoop.com/image/1049/Be-Polite-Go-Fuck-Yourself.html">hypertext refefefefeference</a>
newfound respect for open source
"Microsoft, despite its newfound respect for open source, isn't about to seed the open-source market with its crown jewels."
Why would MS Office for Linux be open source?
$10 business card holder
So when you found the product you were looking for, was it in the sort of store that would be well served spending $$$$ to build a searchable/indexable website version of their catalog/inventory, to have someone create (and keep current!) a Facebook page, and to research Google Search & Maps and Bing and make sure that Sally's Stationary Store comes up right alongside Staples and Office Depot? That would get Sally what, the pleasure of knowing you didn't have to go too far out of your way to bring them your $10? There's money to be made giving Sally that hip feeling sure, but you could just sell her some wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men to put on the roof and get Sally a similar result, quite possibly even more people would notice.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtespeLin2c
"valuable tools for the police, or for searching collapsed buildings in rescue operations."
Seems like the mantra of a developing Skynet. Don't worry meatbags, these new additions to the hive are only being created for your benefit.
Given how many earthquakes there are, and then how many buildings collapse in those earthquakes, and how many of those buildings have people in them, and how many of those people become trapped, and then how many of those trapped people could possibly be saved, you could count the lives saved annually by these new tiny flying kill-bots in the handfuls, maybe. Meanwhile on the battlefield...
Also reminds me of the old copyright saw: just because there are possible non infringing legitimate uses for your technology, that doesn't mean that it is good / allowed to exist.
still with the capitalism === democracy
"Please name one." Maybe I could if the leader of the free world hadn't been so bloodthirstily burning down villages around the world in order to save them.
"Yes, it's called a "one-party" system, the complete opposite of democracy." It's different than pluralistic democracy, but it is not the opposite of democracy. In the opposite of democracy the king appoints governors and doesn't even bother pretending to let common people vote.
"WIth Communism you have no choice, indeed not agreeing with "the state" is usually going to mean prison time (if you're lucky)." The USA has more people in prison than any other country. Explain how the House Un-American Activities Committee fits into your worldview of communism = dictatorship and capitalism = freedom to vote for who you choose.
"If you didn't notice, the Berlin Wall fell because the people in the Communist countries got tired of not having choices." It might have also had something to do with the USSR bankrupting itself trying to maintain some semblance of competitiveness with the totally insane level of mililtary spending in the USA. Do you think history will be as kind in describing the fall of the USA-Mexico wall, where the misery and death is an order of magnitude higher?
I won't mention my opinion of your strong points, or lack of them.
apples and oranges
Communism compares to capitalism. Democracy compares to dictatorship. Communism does not compare to democracy. You can have communist democracies and you can have capitalist disctatorships.
Communism does not mean a group of leaders deciding what everyone does. Even in Stalin's harsh version, the party was just a temporary situation meant to lead one day to true full blown communism, or at least he paid lip service to the theory.
Communist countries do elect representatives in a democratic fashion, it's just that they must all be from the communist party. Meanwhile in the USA, instead of 1 you get 2 parties to choose from, how much better is that? ;-) You have the Republican and the Democratic wings of the corporatist party eating each other's tails, could you imagine nationalizing and then privatising everything every 4 years??
Zorg's ZF-1 with repeat button ftw
Can't believe nobody mentioned this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pxjnl1yuXk
What a great movie.
WHY people are searching for what they are searching
I'm searching for something so that I can find it. If you put a bunch of moving flashing lights in my way, I will think about searching some other way. Even if you put an ad up for exactly the perfectly right thing every time someone looks at your page, you will get a sale from maybe 5 in a million of your visitors instead of 1 in a million. Either way you end up with 999,995+ visitors who suffer varying episodes of annoyance for your efforts and nothing much else. People think if they just tweak the formulas a little bit all of a sudden being advertised at will be a desireable experience or something...
The question we products have to answer is just how much we will put up with being considered a product.
I look at an item in the store, and it occurs to me how things like people pondering strategies for advertising campaigns, bankers working on tweaking a few more points out of all the money they create out of thin air, various seats of government with the cesspool of coutiers that always follow, managers striving for total situational awareness and control, sundry executive level parasites, and I wonder what the $19.99 I'm looking at would be without any of all that - maybe $4? And I wonder what the goal of the game played between free market and planned economies was? Which one was nimble and which one was bogged down with bureaucracy and layers of people adding no value and grunts at the bottom with motivation deficiencies? What exactly did capitalism win? The prize for being the most inneficient soul crushing minutely monitored war hungry dog eat dog inform on your neighbour way of life going? Grumble grumble get off my yard etc...
sigh
first they set up an underclass by rounding up africans and bringing them over as slaves. the people who werent african didnt mind, in fact they enjoyed all the inexpensive merchandise that resulted.
then they wiped out the indigineous population. the people who werent native didnt mind, in fact they enjoyed all the lebensraum.
then, since slavery had since been outlawed, to keep the underclass vigorous they brought in chinese and treated them like pack animals. people who werent chines didnt mind, in fact they rather enjoyed getting their railroads built and laundry done for peanuts.
then they made drugs illegal and rounded up (and are still rounding up) anyone who chooses anything besides the bibles own family&society enhealthening alcohol. alcoholics and people who get high on life werent bothered.
then they rounded up the japanese and sent them to camps. people who werent japanese didnt mind, in fact they enjoyed the fire sale prices on their property.
then they rounded up the communists and destroyed their lives. people who werent communist didnt mind, in fact denouncing the competition was an easy way to get ahead in the rat race.
then they beat and even opened fire on people against the war in vietnam. people who werent against the war couldnt care less.
then they came for the muslims, the copyright infringers, the people who like raw milk, the people who like alternative medicine, the people against the wars in the middle east, the earth firsters, the animal rights activists, the occupy protesters, etc etc etc, giving themselves more and more overreaching powers at each step. the people who werent any of those just kept watching the superbowl and survivor and generally being good little consumers figuring it could never happen to them.
and then one day, when joe the plumbers favourite web forum (model railroading, stamp collecting, whatever) was all of a sudden not available because of something to do with copyright violation, he went ahead and looked into it and found out there was a way around it, and regained himself access. which according to sopa is illegal immoral job killing and downright devilish, and so they finally got around to coming for him too.
and the people who werent him, like the original poster above, cheered and said job well done.
"popularity"
"The Steam client in particular broke the 5m concurrent user mark this week, a sign that an increasing number of people are turning to such platforms to amass content."
Nobody "turns" to Steam, they are shoved into it. 4.9 million of those users had never heard of Steam until it was forced on them by a game they had "purchased". 4.8 million of them would uninstall Steam and never go near it again if they had any other choice besides not playing "their" games.
*I will keep my the statistical methodology I used to calculate those numers to myself, thanks in advance for not asking.
**Some people seem to just love Steam. I assume they are shills by the way they crowd into any forum that mentions Steam, but will admit the possibility some of them may be authentic. So maybe not quite everyone who has Steam imposed on them would rather get out.
even tho
even if it was smooth sailing, its still extra hassle dumped on me for nobodys benefit except the publisher and steam. i dont know why you feel happy about doing them any favours beyond handing over your money? whos the simple one here? im not worried about complexity, thanks.
baically the box physically came from a store, it got to my house and i took the disc out, and i expected to install it and play it. i did not expect to be expected to become close friends with a 3rd party such as steam. *IF* i wanted to go online and play multiplayer, i would have nothing to complain about if steam was an option for that, like gamespy or something, in addition to what should be the basic requirement of being able to fire up my own host without asking anyone elses permission, and if steam are all that great i might even come to prefer them over other options. but i feel like i got invited out to dinner by a friend only to realize they are setting me up on a blind date with some marketer or banker or something, and before we can sit down to eat i have to agree in writing to futher dates. even if painfully attractive, my friend crosed a line and i dont much like those kinds of people anyway. my corn flakes are pissed in, we are off on the wrong foot, i am demotivated, not likey to turn out well for anyone involved. there are better ways to go about things.
fck steam
eom.
ok wait, maybe that wont get approved.
i got civ iv complete edition a while ago. right on the box it says:
"DRM Free: The complete Civ IV experience with no Digital Rights Management limitations"
hale fucking lujah!!!1!1!
huge respect boost for the franchise i have loved ever since civ ii :-)
i got civ v for xmas, very exciting, looking forward to it so much. it says on the box:
"*Internet connection and acceptance of Steam Subscriber Agreement required for activation."
jesus tap dancing christ what the hell. 900 deg turn around. i would not have bought it, and rightly so because it turned out a real pain in the behind. i already had the steam client on, i had checked out some free game offer in a silly moment way back, so i already new it wasnt something i was interested in. and after updating, figuring out my password, more downloads, problems etc problems etc, my bias is confirmed - do not want. but it was a gift, so what should i do?
i wont buy a game that uses steam. ive lost interest in any potential civ vi because of their incomprehensible switch to steam. what a terrible stupid useless inconvenience foisted on paying customers, zero respect for any company who thinks its a good idea. boo hiss etc.
wait, what?
"the Supreme Court is about to get its first very high-profile test of its decision-making capabilities"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Kingdom
"The Supreme Court was established by Part 3 of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and started work on 1 October 2009."
Well I'll be a... flabbergasted something or other. If we have a Supreme Court here in Canada, and we always have as far as I was ever concerned, then I just assumed that you there in the Mother Country would have had one for centuries longer. There, I learned something for the day, good night then!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_Canada
"The creation of the Court was provided for by the British North America Act, 1867, renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act, 1867. The first bills for the creation of a federal supreme court, introduced in the Parliament of Canada in 1869 and in 1870, were withdrawn. It was not until 8 April 1875, that a bill was finally passed providing for the creation of a Supreme Court of Canada."
"Prior to 1949, however, the Supreme Court did not constitute the court of last resort; litigants could appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London."
We "finally" got ours in 1875, hehe.
shale gas
whats not to love?
http://thetyee.ca/News/2011/12/09/US-Shale-Gas-Study/
"fellow rogue"
scoundrel, shirley
a crime against humanity
The people of the world got together and we all shared all of our culture. It was beautiful, anyone could get access to practically everything ever created, it could hardly have been improved on. Then the Recording Industry Ass. of America marshalled their forces and declared war on culture. Grandmothers were bankrupted for "stealing" music. RIAA rented politicians who made it more and more of a crime to posess an "unauthorized" recording of a performance. People of the future will look back on this time and shake their heads. The good fight carries on, splintered and underground, but totalitarianism can't win in the end. The internet is based on sharing, the World Wide Web is all about sharing, people instinctually share, often even when it costs (as it certainly *doesn't* when talking about digitized data). Some people think sharing is communist and that communism for some reason is evil. Mostly those people are the people who have more. Those people are losing, those people will lose.
If you went back 25,000 years, and told the cavemen sitting around the campfire to stop singing that song because its your song and you worked hard to create it so they have to give you 3 furs each time they perform it, you would have been banished from the tribe, and they would have laughed and kept singing "your" song. As it was and will and should be.
Your art has no value unless you share it. And once you share it, it's not yours anymore.
RIP Napster.
magically flying goods
if you take the $0.007 (or whatever) of fuel used to get my can of peas onto the store shelf, and increase that to $0.0071 (or whatever) with harsh regressive carbon taxes, I'm not going to starve. But thanks for thinking about me.
Then let's go to darkest Africa and you show me the store with the shelves with the truck pulling up to the back to unload. I assume you picture the rest of the planet to be like your neighbourhood, but so much poorer. For the average earthling (<$2/day), the lucky ones (ie not among the tens of thousands who starved to death today) get their groceries by walking down to the village market to see what the local beasts of burden have dragged in from the fields today. Put a 10,000% carbon tax on and the millenia will continue to pass by as normal.
There are 2 (NEED MOAR):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0RuR3FREFw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lrk2BE4Tqc
Holy shit I would hunt down and kill every one of you to get to see a full feature length amount of this awesomeness. As for another version of WoW, even with a Star Wars skin on it - meh. I guess I would probably try it out if it was free. Galaxies was kind of neat, but not enough to pay a monthly subscription for, glad I didn't since they murdered the thing anyway.
Cookie cutter quests on rails are BORING. It should be totally player driven. I want the fat slob in his mothers basement who's been playing 20 hrs a day for 6 months and built up a Hutt empire the likes of which has never been seen before to have a guy in a cantina where a noob like me can sign up and get marching orders to join a campaign to burn down Mos Eisley on his whim. Or something like that. I want to be able to join the Stormtroopers and work up to being a company leader and then just decide to mutiny and take my men out to be mercenaries for hire, and I want that to piss off whatever guy is battalion commander and for him to hire an assassin to take me down. Or whatever the hell anyone wants. Anything else might as well be single player.
Is it... legal?
I WILL MAKE IT LEGAL
this one?
http://www.underash.net/en_download.htm
Not banned, as far as I know.
A list is here, if anyone knows any that are missing then go ahead and add them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banned_video_games
Wormsign!
laugh it up sickos, real hilarious
www.google.ca/search?q=dog+skinned+alive&safe=off&tbm=vid
"The group temporarily published..."
"temporarily published" - wtf is that?
"Senior figures in the hacktivist collective..." - senior as in members follow their orders?
:P
"£12bn plan to roll out smart energy meters in the UK by 2019"
2019??? Got mine installed a few weeks ago, they'll all be done (BC Canada) by the end of next year:
http://www.bchydro.com/energy_in_bc/projects/smart_metering_infrastructure_program.html
We'll let you know how it goes...
"better targeted ads"
You can't get any better at targetting ads at me than just doing it randomly. Seriously. Do not want. Have never ever bought something because I saw it in an ad. The ad could be for a brand new life extending pill that also make you handsomer and that's just gone on sale for 95% off, and I would pass right by it or get up to use the bathroom while it played. I don't want to know about any "product" unless I am out looking for it, just make it convenient for me to find the information WHEN I WANT IT and that's the best you can do. If you try to cram information down my throat just because you think I might be interested you are pissing in the wind at best, more likely planting the seed of annoyance with your "brand" in my head.
"All this free technology" - so everything isn't hugely more expensive because of all the utterly ridiculously pointlessly retarded amount of resources that go into marketing in all its parasitic forms? The unholy triumvirate of financial and legal and promotional, doing their best to make capitalism into way more of an unworkable joke collapsing under its own weight than communism ever was.
AI
We're no closer to AI than when he first invented the term, only able to make that much more detailed simulations thanks to moore's law marching on. Could have made a computer to win every possible chess match in the 70s if there were terabytes of memory and petabytes of storage and gigahertz of processing power available. Could make an expert system truly expert if you jam in enough rules and have enough processing power to trawl through them all. But that's not how intelligence works. Or maybe it is, who can say, we still have barely the faintest clue.
When the internet gains (gained?) consciousness, the trick will be (is?) to even recognize it as such. If it influences the world, say by creating online personalities, or altering communications between actual personalities online, who could guess what the goal might be? How long do you suppose it could (will?) go on without breaking through the surface of human awareness? When Gaia reaches this level in planetary evolution, who or what out there might take notice? At some point maybe the need for us fungal microbes that made it all possible might fade away, maybe there will be some kind of a molting?
I took the artificial intelligence option at school because it sounded interesting, and it was, but fat lot of good it did me :( Lisp and Prolog, like LSD and DMT, give your brain a good stretching, that can be healthy in some way I suppose, but not much more point to it than that.
Cheers to the man for doing his bit to keep novelty progressing.
By your own admission your "right" to profit is worth more than people's lives. If something saves lives, then getting that something cheaper could save more lives, who are you to tell people they deserve to die because otherwise you would be !cheated!, dying people just line up and you will save them as fast as you can and thank goodness you can set your lawyers on anyone who tries to help or else then what kind of world would we live in. Try a different analogy please.
"income gap at the end of their life times"
Yes, if they had a big hit when they were 10 years old (the vast majority of us won't live past 80), and then never worked another day in their lives. Sorry, I don't have any tears for someone like that.
Not, if they had hits early in their careers and then <gasp>kept working at it</gasp> and created more good music later in their lives. You know, like all the rest of us plebes.
Between copyright/patents and sex/drugs prohibition, no wonder there is so little respect for the law, and the fence post politicians who write the laws, and the scavenger lawyers who argue the laws, with law enforcement personnel stuck trying to maintain some semblance of order under it all.
"an elaborate joke"
Not really very elaborate, considering.
kijiji.ca is still alive and thriving, this is the first I've heard it had anything to do with ebay. No mention on the about page:
http://kijijiblog.ca/about-us/
Now that I look through the other countries (never even occured to me before), I see kijiji still used in a lot of countries, a bunch of countries are gumtree (mostly European), another bunch are slando (mostly Eastern European), and another bunch are ebay related, with a few other random collections of letters as well. What a mess!
"current social networks are highly centralized"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_%28software%29
clouds & social media
"using social media where its own service has failed"
But what if Twitter was down at the same time? I guess then you could say it would truly be time to panic? Because as long as you can tweet to your customers "we are aware that your service is currently unavailable" then you can say you've done everything you possibly could have with a straight face.
productivity
When the paperwork that used to take too much time is automated, then do you end up with more time to do real work? No, because now you can do much more paperwork. When the manager who used to get a report on last week next week now gets a report on yesterday last night, they can dream up 10 times as many reports to be required, and have more meetings to discuss it all. Corporate used to get quarterly reports by division now has day by day results available and wants to drill down to individuals (but not be overloaded!). Where someone used to send out a few memos a day, then dozens of faxes a day, they can now email hundreds of people a day (or "tweet" to thousands). We're all doing more, but are we being more productive? I don't think standard of living is improving anymore anyway, relation? Dragging society down with busy work, because we can?
I sit corrected, thank you
"you should get your facts straight...."
Which was kind of the point of my posting!!
Shoulda woulda coulda fired a quick question at The Google before posting about my vague recollection of NASA history, but the steam pressure between my ears was red lining!
Revising safety margins in light of new information is all well and good, and in this case safe is actually even safer than we thought, but we are talking about highly radioactive substances that will melt your face of if you look at them funny, when we are assured that it is absolutely safe then it's very uncomfortable to find out that there was actually something left to learn about it, even if in this case the missing information was in our favour.
*8-)
re: Chemistry
Sounds very convincing, is that based on some wondrous new discoveries in chemistry I haven't heard of? They didn't know this before?? Did not take water into account??? Is this supposed to be more or less comforting than when they mixed metric and imperial and a space shuttle blew up???? Lessons learned, now it's actually really safe for real this time, honest!!
So what are the "unkown unknowns" now?????
headlines?
How about book titles? If I put together a list of <someobscurecategory> books, and put it up on my website *with ads!1!!* for fans of <someobscurecategory>, when the publishing houses notice they can say "hey look someone has come up with an inovative new way to make money, let's milk them to death with court cases and outrageous demands for fees". Book titles are hard to come up with, and if someone comes up with a way to make money from them, then that should be turned into less money so that some corporations can get their rightful cut, and then even less money as some oversized fee collecting bureaurocracy is set up and populated with useless hangers on.
When the whole point of headlines / book titles / sound recordings / video recordings in the first place was to entice people into lining up for the full experience, and they still perform that function nicely, but once the smell of money gets in the water the lawyers get into a frenzy and people start getting weird ideas that where headlines were once written for hire and then given away to anyone who would take one now they are some kind of works of art that nobody should be able to experience without paying a fee to a huge parade of middlemen.
The ridiculousness rolls on. Small wonder so many people tune out?
coleco tabletops?
I didn't see any of these:
http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Coleco/PacMan.htm
Tim Worstall
Do you think the carbon tax we have here in British Columbia is different in some substantial way? Or did you just not know about it?
http://www.livesmartbc.ca/government/carbon_tax.html
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/canada-politics/b-c-carbon-tax-successful-other-provinces-worry-195524669.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/bc-finds-success-with-controversial-carbon-tax/article2084989/
http://www.metronews.ca/halifax/life/article/905211--b-c-carbon-tax-reaches-3rd-anniversary--page0
"poutinerie" ftw
look at the menus for inspiration:
http://www.mybigcheese.com/
http://smokespoutinerie.com/
end of discussion.
(+1 for donairs, for a little variety now and then)
(deep fried pork cutlets compare how exactly???)
"Attack of the Giant Hogweed"
Love the organ intro:
http://www2.worksafebc.com/Publications/Multimedia/Videos.asp?ReportID=34980
(warning: contains burn examples)
re: Clare
"I program Microsoft FrontPage 2002. I have never seen the problems you mention, maybe this is more secure than what you use for your web sites?"
LOL, ROFL, hehehe, hahaha, harharhar!!1!
"web specialist"
That's awesome.
Thanks for the chuckles.
analyst predictions
We sold our first one today, which means we sold none yesterday, so if we follow this daily infinity percent increase trend out to 2015, ZOMFG $73 TRILLION MARKET HOP ON WHILE THE HOPPING IS GOOD!!!1!!eleventy1!!!
castrate??
I understood it to be more like circumcision. In order to technically be castration, wouldn't it need to involve the ovaries? I don't think they cut that deep?
So ban it all then, including peircings and tatoos and branding.
But seriously, nobody should be allowed to do that shit to children, male or female.
Vomiting icon please.
re: Matt Bryant
There's an open market for energy???
Conventional coal stations are competing entirely on their own two feet??
Everything boils down to cost, so that if something doesn't generate acceptable income then there is no possible other reason for that something to exist?
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